


The Man Who Shows Such Wonders, Help Me Praise

by akathecentimetre



Series: A Gentleman's Agreement [3]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-20
Updated: 2017-09-20
Packaged: 2018-12-31 23:08:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12143109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: “Don’t let any of them vomit on you. It’syourbloody birthday.”“Noted,” Abdul smiled, looking young and intelligent and alive and everything Thomas found he was starting to want. “Good night, Thomas.”





	The Man Who Shows Such Wonders, Help Me Praise

**Author's Note:**

> I cannot stop writing this bloody 'verse! Here's Thomas's POV on events in parts 1 and 2 of the first fic in this series...

*

From the very first moment of knowing him, Thomas Nightingale noticed that you could read Abdul Walid’s face like a book.

It was almost uncanny, sometimes. Thomas could have fallen back on all sorts of queasy stereotypes, learned across his very English life, about emotional Scots, and they still wouldn’t have done the man justice. He could see the studied indifference of an overworked medical student break and crack when Thomas let slip his birthdate in the hospital cubicle at UCH; from as far away as an upper-storey window, he could see the excitement and curiosity under the wind-tangled ginger hair down below as Walid paced the pavement and knocked at the Folly door and went away each evening deflated, but never defeated.

He had to admit, nevertheless, that he hadn’t anticipated his acquaintance with the doctor to progress much further beyond the first conversation they had in the sitting room of the Folly. Thomas should, in retrospect, have picked up on the fact that Walid left multiple cups of tea cooling into being undrinkable in his haste to continue on with what felt like the hundreds of questions he had about Nightingale’s age, his medical history, and, eventually, the nature of Newtonian magic; he should have picked up on what that expressive face was actually telling him about the determination of the man to come back, and come back again, as he did over the following months, filling the library with notebooks cluttered with cramped, unreadable (doctor’s) handwriting on items of interest he had picked up from the English texts on its shelves, memorization tables for Latin verbs, and many, many scrawled question marks.

It was difficult, he supposed, to admit someone into a life lived so solitarily for over thirty years. Walid, on the other hand, made it look effortless to incorporate an entirely new plane of existence into the one he’d known and grown up in.

He found himself even more surprised by Molly’s attitude to having someone new in the Folly. Her initial reaction, and the stern disapproval of all the generations of spirits who clearly inhabited the house, was completely understandable – if inconvenient, because it did neither of them any favors to have Walid looking uneasily over his shoulder at nothing, as he frequently did during his first few weeks of visits. Thomas guessed that Molly was even more put out than she would readily put on to have her solitude interrupted, and that it was only the grudging training she had received as a scullery girl that was keeping her civil.

But she still baked fresh teacakes whenever she knew Walid was coming, and she listened carefully – and with a growing sense of interest, Thomas thought – to Abdul’s hesitantly polite descriptions of his dietary restrictions, which she followed with no fuss. The fact that she let Walid give her her own physical – when Thomas stepped forward and put a hand on Walid’s back, between his shoulderblades, to lend him support and remind him not to shiver when her mouth opened and her tongue slithered out – was perhaps the bravest thing she had ever seen her do.

Molly was better at being open to and young in the world than he was, he thought, despite her seclusion. There was something desperately sad, and definitely censorious, in the realization that she had grown silent and empty with the house as he declined, and that he should have done more over the years to encourage her inner life.

The morning when he came downstairs to hear some sort of God-awful rock and roll – was it rock? the last modern music he had heard was from that band of mop-haired boys from Liverpool, simply because they couldn’t be avoided – blasting out of the library was all the proof he needed that Molly had fully accepted their guest. When he peered in, it was to the sight of Walid leaning over the 1930s record player that had spent decades sitting forlornly in a corner, newly spick and span, and a pile of vinyl in its sleeves on the nearest desk; Molly was standing a few feet away, clutching her duster and hissing with displeasure.

“Hm,” Abdul said, and speedily took the needle off the record. “Alright, no Blockheads. How about this, then – ”

Thomas couldn’t honestly have identified what followed as music, but Molly was suddenly transfixed, her lips drawing back into a grim smile.

Abdul looked up and saw Thomas standing in the doorway. “ _Janie Jones_ ,” he said happily. “She has good taste.”

“Does she?” Thomas asked, bewildered, and retreated rapidly when Abdul launched into what sounded like an enthusiastic and highly technical discussion on how to go about ‘headbanging’ to the Clash without hurting oneself.

Abdul really was very young – he found himself thinking that often. It took conscious and reluctant effort for Thomas to push past memories of the war and the years of the depression in grey, cast-down London and remember what it was like to be in his twenties and accomplished and devil-may-care – not that Abdul was reckless, but compared to Thomas’s state of stasis he was positively exhausting. His proposals for experiments and his requests for information (always politely and genteelly transmitted, but constant nonetheless) were each a gust of chilled, exuberant air into the stuffy atmosphere that had become Nightingale’s life, to the point where he wondered what on earth his de-aging had been for, if it wasn’t to furnish him with the energy he apparently needed to accommodate his new world.

It was the trip up to Aberdeen which finally got him – at least a little – into the spirit of the whole endeavour, as he got his mothballed Jag out of storage, paid a mechanic a frankly exorbitant amount to get it running again, and let Abdul pile a duffel bag and what looked like an entire year’s worth of issues of several medical journals into the boot. There was something about the way Walid perked up in the front seat when they crossed the border into Scotland that Thomas couldn’t help but find endearing, and his enthusiasm over the results of Thomas’s brain scans was even more so.

“Brilliant,” Walid said at one point as they were driving back, giving Thomas a broad grin. “You must be pleased.”

“Should I be?”

“Of course!” Abdul said. “Your health is immaculate. You’re a bloomin’ miracle. That’s more than pleasing in my book.”

It was more than a little disquieting, he found, to be cared about by another – a new – human being. He had rather fallen out of practice in that area. And he kept on being surprised by it, especially when the spectre of his _future_ health came into question.

He had made an art, since the war, out of the act of puttering. In the wake of taking Sidney Travers’ body to Walid at UCH in 1982 he did a lot of it, drifting aimlessly around Russell Square and through the bowels of the Folly, not entirely sure what he was supposed to be feeling in the absence of allowing himself to grieve. It was dark by the time he came back upstairs to the ground floor and saw Abdul’s coat hanging in the foyer, and when he found the good doctor in the library the seriousness on Walid’s face as he put down the register of deaths startled him.

“Is something wrong?”

“I want to examine you,” Abdul said, and pulled at the strap of a bag across his chest; he had brought his tools with him from the hospital, and looked pale. “If I may. I need to set some things to rest.”

Thomas acquiesced, and sat quietly in a chair at the nearest reading table, and watched Abdul’s face change, slight traces of relief creeping into it as he checked the usual parameters – heart rate, eyes clear, breathing deep.

“Do you ever get headaches,” he asked abruptly as he was peering into one of Thomas’s ears, “when you perform magic?”

“Not since I was a child,” Thomas replied, shaking his head slightly. “There were occasional incidents when a boy would overdo it at school, but there were never any serious effects. The masters kept a stern eye on our exertions.”

“What form did any of that pain take, when you did feel it?”

“A throbbing in the temples, perhaps. Fatigue, too, though nothing a good night’s sleep didn’t fix.”

“Good,” Abdul said, sounding better by the moment, though still serious. “And you must tell me immediately if there is ever a time when you _are_ exhausted by it.”

Thomas touched Abdul’s wrist to dissuade him from his work, and to be looked at properly by worried blue eyes. “What’s this all about?”

Walid hesitated, but Thomas could see his duty as a physician winning out. “Travers’ brain was utterly destroyed,” he said flatly. “Beyond anything I’ve seen or been taught, and in ways no authority recognizes. The only conclusion I can come to is that his magic is what did it.”

Thomas tried to let that sink in, and failed. “Are you saying that I – ”

“No,” Walid said quickly, taking on his usual tone of expertise as though a switch had been flipped. “No. Your scans from last year were exemplary, and I can’t imagine how or why they would have degraded since then. But this is a serious problem, and one we have to examine carefully to determine what your long-term prognosis will be.”

“How does that happen?”

“It won’t be easy,” Abdul said, lines of frustration appearing between his eyebrows. “MRI technology is still spread thin on the ground, and where there’s a machine there are hordes of patients who need it. I can proceed with some physical and psychological testing to determine the state of your memory and cognitive function, but it will take me a while to get up to speed on the relevant literature.”

Not for the first time, Thomas found himself being quietly astounded by the idea that anyone so young could care about anyone that much, least of all an old wizard in a cobwebbed house.

“Well,” he said finally. “I look forward to it. I will help you in any way I can.”

“It’s not me you’re helping,” Abdul demurred, but he still looked pleased. “We’ll figure it out, and keep you safe. And,” he added, with a little spark in his expression, “I get to name a condition. I suppose I’m starting early.”

“You do that,” Thomas laughed, and, watching Abdul’s uplifting little wave goodbye from the front door as Thomas watched him from the stairs above, wondered how he had somehow missed that the young man was in his life to stay.

***

By the mid-eighties, Thomas took to visiting Walid at UCH for his regular checkups, and to observe Abdul at work in the morgue.

He no longer looked like a student, now; he had filled out, lost his previous haircut (Thomas still had very little idea what ‘punk’ meant, but found Abdul’s more classic do far more comfortable to look at), had acquired acolytes of his own and was saving up to put money down on a house in Camden, to which effort Thomas had started quietly contributing in 1985. Abdul had raised a wary eyebrow at him when he unfolded Nightingale’s first check, and threatened to give it back, but Thomas had been able to persuade him not only that the Folly and its investments were more than capable of supporting him, but that he thoroughly deserved it for all the work he had done in adding to its archives. The fact that both of those things were true thankfully carried weight in Abdul’s mind, and somehow set Thomas’s mind much more at ease about the nature of their working partnership.

And the archive Abdul had collected was indeed fascinating. Thomas had begun to commit a certain slice of funds every six months or so to their joint efforts to scoop up any strange item or unfortunate corpse which they found from scouring police reports (delivered round the back from an old colleague Thomas knew from the still-distant Force), police scanners, and auction listings, and the stash he knew Abdul was accumulating in his freezers at UCH grew apace. They found supposed fragments of unicorn horn and fossilized evidence of what a Cornish farmer claimed was dragons (“It’s just a coprolite, Thomas, don’t be so bloody squeamish – ”); on one memorable occasion they wandered around the Royal Albert Hall fine-tuning Abdul’s sense for vestigia, almost getting bowled over by a screaming, ghostly rendition of Verdi’s _Requiem_ in row F.

Abdul continued to check on Nightingale’s reflexes, cognitive abilities, and general health every few months, and a few years in Thomas had to admit the slight guilt he felt at how much he was starting to look forward to those appointments. It was something about Abdul’s professionalism, he decided – he could always find it in him to appreciate competence above most everything else, and Abdul was nothing if not competent.

And if it also had something to do with how he felt at the brief sensations of Abdul’s hands touching him – well, that was his cross to bear.

He forced himself to be present the second time there was a former practitioner who needed an autopsy late in 1987, watching from his perch on a stool with his hands clenched around his staff as Abdul went quietly about the work of inspecting William Dawson. Thomas had known him only briefly during the war – he had been one of the young ones, pale and skinny and pissing themselves with fear, sent out to the continent near the end of it all when every warm body was needed to be thrown into the breach. And Thomas had known almost nothing of his life after that, except that he had become a schoolteacher and retired to Devon; but he pitied the prematurely old, shrunken man he had become, so small and cold under Abdul’s scalpel.

Abdul paused before he started cutting, and gave Thomas a frank look. “Are you sure you want to stay?”

“Yes,” Thomas said, and worked hard to remind himself, as the autopsy proceeded under Walid’s calm, efficient movements, that the spectre of death was far from touching him.

“I’ve come up with a name for it,” Abdul said, as he examined the shocking, bleeding hunk of cauliflowered brain in his hands an hour later. “Though Sir Isaac will have to forgive me for using a Greek root – I’m calling it thaumaturgical. This type of degradation, I mean.”

“Was he in pain, do you think?”

Abdul considered Thomas’s question carefully, his brow furrowed, as he gingerly placed the brain back into Dawson’s skull. “I don’t think so – at least, I hope not. But I also doubt he was much of his old self, anymore.”

It was growing dim in the late afternoon as Walid rolled the body away; as he finished scrubbing his hands, he looked over at where Thomas was still contemplating shadows and smiled. “My colleagues are taking me out and trying once again to get me drunk tonight, if you’d care to join us.”

“Oh?” Thomas said, blinking his way back to reality. “What’s the occasion?”

“I’m hitting the big one,” Abdul laughed. “Apparently life begins at thirty. Or ends – it depends very much on who you ask.”

He led Thomas a few blocks southwards from the Cruciform to the Marlborough Arms, a cramped pub near Birkbeck where there was a veritable crowd waiting for them. Thomas had heard about Lewis, the Welsh mountain man who tutored Abdul in pathology, but the others were all a bit of a blur of young men Abdul had known in university, or in residency, and were all the same sort of friendly toughs and bluffs that belied their extreme educations. Abdul made sure he bought his own drink to be sure no one had spiked it (“We’ve been wanting to see him off the hook for _years_ ,” one of them lamented loudly) and brought Thomas a pint of something dark and British, and looked happy in the company to a degree that Thomas wasn’t sure he was constitutionally prepared for.

“Is this your Daddy Warbucks, then?” one of the junior doctors asked, sounding drunkenly affectionate, and Thomas noticed that, somewhat incredibly, there wasn’t a trace of discomfort in Walid’s face at the suggestion.

“Mr. Nightingale is a patron of sorts,” Abdul said, lifting his glass and tilting it respectfully towards Thomas. “He’s got one of the best collections of medical esoterica you’re ever likely to come across, and has been letting me poke around in it.”

“Wouldn’t mind a crack at that,” one of the other men said, nudging Abdul in the shoulder as he looked at Thomas inquisitively.

“Hands off,” Walid said instantly, and they all laughed as though it all made a ridiculous sort of sense, and wasn’t distasteful or confusing in the least.

Thomas found he could stand an hour in their company, at least, and listened with interest to their accounts of what passed for shenanigans and sexual exploits in this new day and age – but he slipped out early regardless, taking comfort in the half-empty street outside and the distant laughter of a Friday night in a quiet corner of a campus during the holidays. The door banged open again behind him as he was settling into his coat, and Abdul came out behind him, squinting with his normal fond irritation at the unlit cigarette between Thomas’s fingers.

“Sorry about them,” he said, nodding back at the pub. “A bit much, perhaps?”

“Not at all,” Thomas said, and was surprised to find that he meant it. “Different, but not unwelcome.”

“Good,” Walid nodded. “I’d better get back before one of them decides to pass out,” he said, with a sigh. “See you for Latin in the morning?”

Thomas, unbidden, found himself thinking of the unfairness of it all, and reached out to take Abdul’s elbow. “You know,” he said, uncertain of what exactly he was trying to convey, “you don’t have to take care of everyone.” 

Abdul’s eyebrows rose; for a moment, he looked flattered, before he visibly took what Thomas meant to heart. “No,” he said gently, “I don’t have to. But I tend to, and I find it suits me.”

“All right,” Thomas said, feeling grateful and oddly at home, and patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t let any of them vomit on you. It’s _your_ bloody birthday.”

“Noted,” Abdul grinned, looking young and intelligent and alive and everything Thomas found he was starting to want. “Good night, Thomas.”

***

Thomas had spent the first half of his life surrounded by and living among young men. He had been one once, though he struggled to remember it sometimes; and the more awake he grew to the modern world, the more he realized how much he had missed in not being a part of it, and how much his old world was a frightening parody of it.

He worried, now, about the effects of magic growing back into London without practitioners to harness it. He worried about (and marveled at) the river goddesses and the tributes they demanded, how they pulled the strings of power in the City with such ease and charm. He worried about thaumaturgical degradation, in his quieter moments, and worried about what effect his and Walid’s modern tools of detection might have on distorting a problem no one, before the war, had ever seemed to care about when being a practitioner was simply a way of life. He worried, with puzzlement, over the fact that he seemed to have stopped reverse-aging at some point in 1988; after much prodding and poking about his person, Abdul had simply proclaimed him healthy and static, and the only difference he could really see between himself at the end of the war and the months when the nineties approached was the addition of a few discreet grey hairs.

He worried about Walid, in ways which he found both natural and disquieting. He worried about Abdul’s workload, juggling a series of ever more-senior postings at UCH with weekends at the Folly or out and about with Thomas hunting down artifacts or turning up of an evening with parcels of sweetmeats for Molly; he worried about the frustrations of continuing to work on magical problems which presented no easy solutions and refused to give up their secrets even when up against the most modern of techniques.

The month when he realized he had finally tipped over into worrying about Abdul’s personal safety when it came to the magical world, he knew he was lost. And it was a prophecy which came to pass faster than he could ever have been ready for.

One of the side effects of his growing-older-but-not – one which Walid was very interested in tracking – was that the further he got from 1900, the less sleep he needed. He actually clung to that fact as a sort of reassurance, that he was aging in a way which made sense; it also meant that he spent many nighttime hours reading in the Folly’s library, listening to the wireless, or, if he was particularly bored, turning to a police scanner channel and amusing himself with the odd adventures Londoners got up to in the witching hours. Since he’d started the habit, he’d paid aural witness to several muggings, two incidents of statue-toppling, and a rather intriguing confrontation with an escaped pet tiger.

It was a chilly night in September, 1990, when he came downstairs at two in his dressing gown, made himself a cup of tea (he had strictly forbidden Molly to wait upon him during his late wanderings), and settled in next to the fireplace in the sitting room with the scanner; and he was half-dozing when a series of staticky pronouncements came through which sent ice down his spine.

“ _Yeah, I’m outside 32 Albert Street, in Camden,_ ” the patrol officer on the channel said, sounding bored. “ _There’s a B &E in progress. Requesting backup_.”

“Molly,” Thomas shouted, and flew out of his chair like he’d heard a call to scramble.

He hadn’t been officially invited to Abdul’s new home, but he’d heard enough bits and pieces about the purchasing process to know that Walid was very pleased with it, and happy to have a place to call his own after years of shifting arrangements between flats in various states of disrepair with one or some of his colleagues – and he’d done a little discreet digging for the address on one occasion when Abdul had mentioned having the mortgage papers in his bag.

At the time he hadn’t been proud of it, but had justified his snooping with the assurance that he would at least be able to arrange some sort of housewarming gift to be delivered. Now, as he got into the Jag with Molly hovering nervously at the door and slammed his way through the gears on his way up Eversholt Road, there was a grim satisfaction in his decision – but it was entirely swamped by the utter terror of what he might find.

The patrol officer was hovering at the bottom of the steps to the handsome brick and limestone rowhouse, and starting to look a bit unnerved – and Nightingale couldn’t blame him, because as he pulled the Jag haphazardly into a nearby half-empty parking space he could hear whatever it was inside, and it sounded big. There was a snarling, shuffling sound seeping out of the front door, which hung open, and there was broken glass on the stoop.

“Oi,” the policeman said, putting out a warning hand as he approached. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to step back.”

“What’s in there?”

“Step back, please, sir,” the officer said, sounding more and more irritated. “There’s a crime in progress here, but we’ll be able to sort it out as soon as more men from my nick arrive.”

Nightingale said nothing, and only stopped himself from using an _impello_ to get the man out of the way with difficulty as he took the steps two at a time.

He would never be able to describe to himself, even much later and in the quiet and peace of home, how he had felt when he’d stepped into Abdul’s front corridor, into the devastation of an ordered life turned upside-down and wrecked, and seen blood trod into the floorboards. It felt like the war, like Ettersburg with central heating, like the world had once again been pulled out from underneath his feet and was just waiting for him to fall into the abyss that was being alone.

The distant moan and cough from the sitting room switched his senses back on, but it didn’t help as much as it should have done to see that Abdul was alive – because he was hurt, because he was bloodied and bruised and clearly barely able to move, and it wasn’t likely that he was aware of Thomas’s presence. There was fear and anger thick in the air, and it was everything Thomas had never, ever wanted to happen.

He flattened himself against what was left of the wall next to the stairs, his adrenaline surging, as the goblin lumbered out of the kitchen at the back of the house and hissed its way over to where Abdul was lying. “Where is it?”

 _Oh, don’t_ , Thomas thought, breathless and already certain of what he was about to hear. _Don’t, you damned romantic fool –_

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Walid mumbled, and then he was crying out, and Thomas couldn’t bear it anymore, and turned around the doorway to see, as if in sharp, black-and-white lines in the snow, Abdul futilely trying to pull the goblin’s clawed hands away from his neck.

He hadn’t killed anything – or anyone – for a very long time, and he horrified himself by how much he enjoyed it. But all he cared about was that he was able to step over the twitching legs of the goblin as it bled out into the carpet, and kneel down to Abdul, and be looked at with wide, very much alive – albeit blackened – eyes.

“How?” Abdul panted.

“Late nights often yield magic,” Thomas said, focusing very tightly on his words as he put a hand on top of Abdul’s where he was clutching at the lapel of Thomas’s coat. “I heard your address mentioned on the old police scanner.”

Abdul laughed, sounding exhausted and petrified, but there it was in his face as usual, the fondness, the relief, the love. “You know my address?”

Thomas would have fumbled out some excuse that didn’t involve him being an arse, but he was suddenly rather too preoccupied with being kissed to care.

He didn’t actually sleep much once he and the tardy ambulance crew had gotten a half-conscious Abdul to bed. In the dawn that followed, the assault of Starcastle on Abdul’s half-broken record player and the clear sight of all the damage that had been caused to the walls, floors, and furniture of the house was too much to take in; he decided to take Walid away with him very deliberately, seeing the pain that was not completely physical in Abdul’s face, and knew he had made the right decision when Molly met them at the door to the Folly, clasped Abdul so hard around the arms that her fingers lost what little color they had, and instantly whisked him up for a hot bath.

Abdul took a long time cleaning himself up – for which Thomas couldn’t exactly blame him – and Thomas found himself meandering towards the stairs as he waited and then quietly walking up them, leaving Molly peering up at him from the entrance to the scullery. The door to the bathroom was slightly open, and Thomas curiously felt no guilt in putting his head around it to look inside.

He had been planning to ask if Abdul needed anything, but found his words dying before they ever got out. Part of the picture before him was horrifying – if for no other reason than the blooms of black and blue across and down Abdul’s back where he sat forward in the copper bath, and the exhausted slump of him as he propped his head on one hand, his elbow on the edge of the ancient tub.

But his eyes were closed, and Thomas could see him thinking. Could see him remembering his way through the night, could see him remembering where he was and that he was safe, and saw – like a miracle – the slow smile that spread across his face, as hopeful a contemplation of the future as Thomas could have ever wanted.

He withdrew quietly, making sure not to make a noticeable sound, and, telling himself _Yes_ for the first time in many a long year, went to pour himself a drink, and to do the last of his waiting.

*

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Edmund Halley's 1687 dedicatory poem to Isaac Newton's _Principia_. Thanks for reading! (Oh, and here's the [Janie Jones](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyoW0tf6N-Q)...)


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